Oxidation
by RaptorAssassin
Summary: He is tangible darkness, the death of sunlight, the antithesis of the human conscious; Upon heavy shoulders he carries the pyramidal weight of mans' most vile acts as Atlas carries the world. Even the gods are subject to retribution. PH and OCs.
1. Prologue

Prologue

In a slowly widening puddle of lifeless moonlight lay a small figure. Swathed in twisted colorless sheets upon a bare mattress in a small, slanted and darkish room, one could discern the palest of female hands wrought about a frail body like ivy on a white pillar. Strewn in glistening rivers were the seemingly endless tresses of her hair, woven around her throat like a noose. In her trance-like sleep she sensed this; her face was downturned into her bare chest, her small arms around her, grasping – the nails burning into the skin of her back. The tears flowed from her clenched eyes in fiery torrents, hot with pain, seeping into her single pillow.

She wrenched in her dreams; her frame bending into itself violently, lips parting mouthing the same words over and over and over again. But her voice was lost – gone, for if you were here in this room, standing in her pitch black corner among the tattered pointe shoes and ruined textbooks, adrift the cobwebs she could never clean, among the lengthy, distorted shadows that never left her, even if you listened she would never divulge her secrets to you, because she did not know them herself.

Her blood was boiling, steaming through her pulsing veins. The hairs on her nape stood erect with undiluted horror. She wrenched again, more violently, her torso moving on its own accord – rising away from the mattress, her head dangling listlessly in its wake, shrouded in gleaming black hair. The sheets fell away from her as she rose to her feet in the center of her bed and slowly stood. Her was body illuminated in the cold aura of the moon's inverse light. A small foot stepped forward, a tear streaked hand felt for the handle, grasped it –

The shriek of grinding metal.

It was not the first time Rain LeClere had woken up to the sound of her own screaming.


	2. Precipice

_Dear Anybody Reading,_

_Hi guys! If you're reading this, I really appreciate it. This came to me after playing the 6__th__ installment and becoming entranced with some sick ideas I was having. This is my first fic and I will apologize for the length of this opening before the gore and weirdness, so please bear with me. I promise you all this will get strange fast, and I don't want to disappoint. :) Please review, it makes it all worth it, and if I fuck anything up please tell me, albeit politely. _

_NOTE: Although this chapter doesn't go into it, things will get explicit soon. I mean, come on. PH is in this story, gotta keep it real._

Chapter One: Precipice

In cold and poorly lit auditorium the long fingers of a lone pianist laid bare the isolated melody of moonlight sonata to a nearly empty room. His hands moved slowly over the keys, skillfully, emotionally. He could not keep his eyes off of the single dancer on the stage, whose liquid movements put a disparity in the pianist's view of his own skill that numbed his bones.

The choreographer's narrow, watery eyes scrutinized every movement, his nose wrinkling, sweaty from the hot vapors of his whiskey laced latte. The girl on the stage was aglow with only a single spotlight, performing en pointe. From behind dirty, expensive glasses his eyes flicked from the moth-eaten, hand-dyed black pointe shoes to the handmade outfit. Layers upon layers of painstakingly cut grey-black silk of the lightest weight available flowed around her like smoke within a wine glass. One toe before the other, to and fro in a perfect line, the arch of her balanced foot at a severe angle. Her delicate ankles making butterfly movements, whispering barely a sound upon the dusty floor, as if there were no bones in her body. Rotations, gestures all slow, each deliberate, the traces of her fingers and limbs sliding through the air like a fencer's foil set in the time that only a snowflake knows.

"That will do."

Itzak trailed the piece off on the piano as Rain stopped mid gesture, like a candle being snuffed out. Slowly she looked up from where her grey eyes had fallen, landing gently on the choreographer's face, who did not receive them back with any semblance of the same kindness. Her gut turned from beneath the layers of silk and crystal. She already knew the answer.

"Well…That was extremely enlightening. Tell me Ms. LeClere, where did you study ballet?"

Her blood turned to ice. She could feel Itzak's eyes turning away from her.

"I attended the East Coast Academy of Classical Ballet for seven years."

"Yes my dear, but did you graduate?"

Her eyes fell to the floor.

"No sir, I did not. I fell-"

"Madame, let me give you a bit of advice. If you want to be taken seriously in this town, have your daddy run along and buy you some new shoes, a big-girl dance-skin, and you may want to consider finishing your education at an accredited academy. Although at your age-"

He looked her up and down.

"-you need to consider your other options."

With a flick of his cashmere scarf, he left the room, latte streaming steam, the hard click of good shoes making a crescendo up the aisle.

Rain stood frozen on the stage. At last, her head dipped down slowly back to its familiar face, nestled in her clavicle. At only 23 years old, her dreams were already dying.

Later, with her long wool coat, slightly too big, slipped around her shoulders, she stepped out with Itzak under his umbrella into the freezing rain of the metropolis. Grey torrents of water poured from the smoky, thundering skies in sheets, the tops of the buildings swallowed up into infinity by the storm. He hailed a cab, it screeched to a halt-

-instinctively her head snapped towards the source of the sound as she froze in her pace.

"What, what the hell is it?" Asked Itzak, his eyes growing wide at the expression on her face. She had glazed over, paralyzed. Her expression stopped him dead in his tracks.

"Rain?"

She came to, blinking a few times, and met eyes with him.

"I'm fine. Just a little startled."

Together the pair piled into the taxi, the man holding his umbrella for the lady and taking her bag for her. Tousled and wet, passengers slid to either side of the window in the back seat and the driver moved the vehicle forward. Rain ran a slender set of fingers over her brow, smoothing back the inky tendrils that had fallen out of her bun. Feeling sick with shame, she avoided Itzak's eyes.

"I hope this doesn't mess anything up with your recital, Itzak."

He turned to look at her. Of Russian descent, he was extremely tall and lean, with luxuriant wavy brown hair, ice blue eyes, with the slightest accent. His features, dotted with the distinction that a man gets with the early onset of age, knitted into a look of pure incredulity.

"Rain, please. He is a cosmopolitan egotist."

Her small, full lips turned into a smile.

"You are so kind to me."

Itzak lit a cigarette with a flick of his hand, took a drag and cracked the window. He did not reply. Rain stared at him, as his lips parted around the narrow cylinder and inhaled. She could see the veins in his neck contract in minutiae as the nicotine flooded his blood, as the tip of the cigarette grew alight. These were the kind of things that she noticed, the small things, and consequently, these were the causations of her suffering. The details never left her.

The taxi pulled up to her apartment building. Itzak turned to look at her. In the cold light of the storm, he could see how hard life had been on her. Of average to small height, she was extremely delicate in build. Her wrists and ankles were doll like, tiny. He observed the line of her shoulder; soft, feminine, like the muscle in her exceptionally long neck which spread to the palate of her face. Her skin was pale to point of semi-translucence, as if she had not seen the sun in a long time. Her eyes were unusually large, completely colorless, caught with the glimmer of the last throes of childhood, but their light was wavering on its last leg. With her unobtrusive eyebrows and small, slightly upturned nose, the only color on her face was the faintest glimmer of rose clinging to the fullness of her tiny lips.

"Rain. Get some rest, ok? You don't look good lately. I want you to know that I absolutely do not mind you coming to listen in on my class. And I do not want this…failure… to distract you."

Their eyes met. She was holding back tears.

"Look, Rain. You have a gift. But I think you may have missed your opportunity. I think it's important that you move forward and forget this."

The ringing of a phone erupted from within the pocket of his trench coat.

"Oh, I need to take this. Hold on."

His face lit up.

"Hi sweetheart."

The rest was in Russian; she knew it was his wife. Rain gathered her bag and opened the car door. She paused for a moment, hoping that he had something else to say, but after a second she knew this was in vain. She opened the car door and stepped out into the torrential downpour. She turned one last time but the car had already begun to move.

Soaking in rainwater, her makeup running in rivulets down her face, she watched the taxi turn the corner and disappear into the distance.

By the time she had reached her door she was already in pieces. Closing the door behind her, she doubled over in agony, dropping her sack of clothes. Still wearing the costume, her own avante garde version of the Black Swan from Swan Lake, she sank to the floor, utterly defeated. And there, lying on the floor, seething in tears with eyes streaked in inky black liner lay the writhing figure of a young woman, drowning in thin air.

She had dressed with so much care. But now her hair had fallen completely out of its impressive architecture, clinging to her wet face as she wept soundlessly on her floor.

"Goddamnit, stop being so sickeningly weak. Get the fuck up."

She rose, painfully and leaned against her wall, legs spread out before her. Tipping her head back to the wall, she stared at the ceiling. Directly above her head, her eyes landed upon the silvery strands of an expansive spider's web, far out of her reach. The whole structure shuddered; a moth had become irreversibly entangled in the trap. Its powdery wings struggled in vain, but the more it protested, the tighter it became ensnared. And then, out of the dark recesses of where the corner met the wall, emerged an enormous spider. Slowly, deliberately, it made its way to the shuddering moth. The moth, seeing its doom, began to still. She watched as the spider descended upon its prey, deftly wrapping it in silk. The little moth shivered in vain as the great spider secured it to the web, pausing, before pressing its fangs to the little insect with a fatal kiss. The spider's glistening, angular abdomen pulsed, as if to a drum. Color drained from its prey, its frail wings jerked weakly.

Rain watched as the prey succumbed quietly to its captor.

When she opened her eyes, she was no longer in her bed.

She shivered violently. Looking down, she could see that her bare feet were upon cold asphalt. It was pitch black in the middle of the night. No streetlights were on to light her path – she could see nothing. And worse yet, her path was thick with a heavy mist. It was impenetrable, impregnable, and harrowingly familiar.

_I've been here._

She was wearing only a thin white sleeveless shift. She wrapped her arms around her, instinctively. Like lead weights were attached to her feet, she lifted one foot and then the other, taking small steps into the endless expanse of shadows around her; a small figure, blind, in the darkness

She still had no concept of where she was, only the faintest memory, a sliver of déjà vu. She drifted ahead like a ghost, barely aware of herself. She wandered along the darkened street, the corpses of building facades flanking her path with their sunken in stoops and blackened windows; hundreds and hundreds of locked doors like long teeth, just barely visible.

She stopped quickly. From behind her and to the left, she could hear a faint rasping. Suddenly awake, Rain turned around quite soundlessly. Her eyes narrowed, trying to peer into the misty blackness. A cold trickle leapt into her stomach. It was so dark, and as far as she could see the only movement was the swirling mist but the sound was definitely there.

Her body reviled, repulsed her growing fear that something unseen was approaching her. She could hear the crescendo of soft, squishy footsteps. Instinctually, her lips quivering, she backed away as it drew nearer, the mounting horror in her gut growing with the ringing in her ears. Out of the pitch blackness, only six feet away from her, a bending, teetering figure emerged. By the time she could see dim outline of the Lying Figure loping toward her, she could smell its rotting flesh.

In a paroxysm of horror she bolted the opposite direction, the padding of her feet bursting with pain with each bare impact with the grimy road. The shadows were moving around her, alert to her presence, the sickening form enveloped in the straightjacket of corpse skin on her heels. A trash can exploded out in front of her – a hideous scraping – a long massive creature with fused hindquarters like a twisted mermaid swiped for her with an unnatural arm ended with re-curved claws, tearing out a sliver of her bicep. Rain screamed in pain and horror as fresh blood spilled into the streets.

With one demon at her front and another from behind, she dashed to her left in wild disorientation, flying up a flight of stone steps. Tripping, she slammed into double doors. She could hear the unearthly howls of hungry demons, clambering over each other in a demented, seething heap, writhing up the stairs after her. Tears of pure terror streamed down her contorted face, hand prying wildly with the handle to the doors until finally it gave. Exploding inside, she barely had time to make out the words "Grand Hotel" from an unlit neon sign before she fell inside, smashing the doors closed behind her…


	3. Confession

_Chapter 3: Also known as, the chapter of RAAAAAAPPPPPPEEEEE!!!!!!_

_Oh heavens, look at the time:) Now that we are done with our introduction, on with it…._

_PS: I promise you, I am not normally this demented. But I have a theory that playing silent hill for too long makes your mind explore weird shit. Please review._

Confession

Her throat was hoarse; panting, she edged away from the door and lost her stomach in a heap in the center of the hall. Wrenching, her body emptied itself in a foaming torrent. Her teeth grinding, she rose slowly, wracked with involuntary spasms. She could still hear the monsters churning outside the door. She turned around, her eyes landing down a long straight corridor bereft of light. An overhead lamp flickered in the distance, casting strange, inconsistent glow to a lobby up ahead. Her heart sank down into her hollowed stomach. She touched the gap on her arm; a long, bloody slit.

_Oh god…_

She ran her fingers over the opened flesh. Blood poured out with any application of pressure, running along the high ridges of her pulsing veins, from the tender underside of her bicep down to the crook of her elbow. In the darkness, the blood looked black, and smelled of copper. She clasped it, wiping her tears and dregs of vomit off her lips until clean with her other arm. Her eyes shifted from her left, to her right, and above.

The feeling of déjà vu intensified.

Rain stood rooted to the spot, her large eyes peering into the darkness up ahead, trying to discern movement. Although she could see nothing but the flickering light flashing it radiance upon rubble and the silhouettes of furniture, she could hear stirring and other noises surrounding her, but from nowhere identifiable. With her only option to go forward, clutching her wounded arm, she inched ahead on her delicate feet, making as little sound as humanly possible. Shaking badly, she pressed on, moved by sheer will, until the hall ended and opened into a large reception room.

It had been beautiful once. Saying that it had fallen into disrepair was a rather large understatement. The walls were in complete deterioration, whole pieces of stone and rebar in heaps on the once high pile of the rich woolen rugs. Entire pieces of wood were gone, ripped off of the very floor by unseen forces, with black shadows marking their former homes. From where she stood, the corner of the wall was ripped off entirely, marred by peeling wall paper and disturbingly large claw marks. Her eyes flitted to the right; the hall to the east of her was entirely dilapidated. Shifting along the wall, so slowly, she nudged her way to a set of double doors on the left and gently, so quietly, turned the handle.

Absolutely nothing. Jammed shut.

Biting her lip, her mind racing in insane directions, she desperately stared at the deteriorated frame of an antique lift ahead of her. Her skin crawled; this was absolutely a horrid idea. Illuminated by that ghastly flickering light, it horrified her. The glowing light of the operation button stared at her like an eye.

CLANG.

She started. Her head whipped around as she pressed herself deeply into the filthy wall. Where had the sound come from? She strained her ears, eyes peering wildly. She couldn't see anything.

CLANG.

-

Absolutely desperate, she leapt towards the lift. Putting each of her hands around the two sides of the rust covered lattice doors, she smashed the grate closed and punched her finger down over and over onto the only button glowing "4."

Looking back to the lobby, she could see an unearthly deformity sprinting toward her on bladed limbs. She screamed like an animal, flying backwards into the elevator as the creature lunged and landed a sickle ended leg into the wrought iron grate, peeling it open like tin. It was a quadruped of sorts; the headless torso of an emaciated man set atop arms and legs twisted back at the joints, tipped with wicked actuating knives. Pulling its blade back out of the grate, to her terror it opened its legs, almost suggestively, revealing a humanoid head dangling from where its testicles should have been – a monsters face with the fogged over eyes of a dead fish, with a small circular mouth full of razor-like teeth.

The elevator screeched to movement, lifting away from the ground and the creature, which had begun to busy itself with the trickle of blood she left behind. She felt like she was going to have a heart attack, pouring in sweat, hyperventilating; her mind failing her any words for what was happening. She was beyond logic, beyond thought. Her instincts coursed through her two directives; to stop the bleeding and hide.

The doors opened. She scooted out and pressed her back against a wall, her chest heaving with racing breaths. She closed her eyes, trying to control herself, but the sound of female breathing simply did not stop with her own. Shuddering, she listened, turning her ear to the close collection of sounds. She sank down to the floor, hair obscuring her shaking, petrified face as a new piece of hell moved into her field of vision.

As if on broken feet, with the sound of grinding joints and sensual, labored breathing stepped the form of a voluptuous woman from the hall obscured around the corner of her wall, if a woman was what you could call it. In the near complete dark, it was visible purely on the merit of its corpselike paleness. Long shapely legs clamored slowly, ungracefully on filthy white pumps, one foot and then the other, the wasp-waisted torso following at odd, stiff angles. Its soft feminine arms were held stiff at the elbows in strange, mechanical positions, bent at the elbow as if with rigor mortis, with one bloodstained hand grasping a rusted scalpel. What tiny light that existed bounced off of the demon's generous bosom, overflowing openly from the flesh-like rags of what was formerly the costume of a nurse.

Shrinking into the corner like an insect, Rain watched in horror as it approached the small pools of fresh blood she had left behind near the elevator. With the nauseating sounds of popping and grinding, more of them emerged from the darkness, twitching and spasming on uncertain legs, rasping dry breaths, armed with rusted pipes, wrenches, and other horrid things to join their sister. Her hands over her mouth, convulsing in fear, she watched as five of these monstrosities teetered nearer and nearer to her. Shrinking as small as she could, she watched helplessly, praying for a quick death until, as if by random, they all seized and halted, one right after another.

In what can only be called amazement, Rain stared at the collection of disfigured females, frozen in contorted positions like hellish mannequins. Minutes passed, waiting. Too scared to move, she merely pretended as if she were a part of the wall. Her eyes had been slowly adjusting to the darkness, and after a long time, she could discern no eyes on the demons – only a mound of melted flesh stretched over a once human face. And then it hit her.

_They can't see me._

In a place such as this, where the rules of logic ceased to apply, she was lost as to what to do next. Cornered entirely, she had no option but to move forward. She tried to stay her breathing, thinking that if she could reduce her breathing, her pulse would steady and quit pumping blood down her arm onto the floor. She knew they could smell her. If she could just sneak past into one of the rooms down the hall, she could quietly lock the door and wait it out until morning, until she could see, if morning came in this backwards place at all.

She rose, determined. Careful movements defined her, and if there was anyone that could do it, it was her. Placing one delicate set of toes ahead of her at a time, she moved slowly, stealthily forward.

_Just pretend they're statues._

The tattered dancer's strength was her focus. While her delicate, lean muscles could do barely a feather's damage to an attacker they were exceptionally controlled in their own right. She was aware of every fraction of position in her body, from the crown of her head, to her fingers and knees. The Nurses were grouped in a convoluted gaggle, sensuous limbs entwined. It was like trying to edge through a rose bush. Rain's grey eyes flitted constantly from face to face, checking for any signs of movement. Their cacophony of breathing was steady, uninhibited, and unaware. Like a bat in a cave, the ballerina's concentration allowed her to sense them on sound alone. She edged into them, vying for the control of her own fear. A long time ago, a friend had told her that she moved as though boneless – and that she did, moving inversely to that way of the rigid demons. Her head tipping back, she bent backwards while moving onward with her unnatural grace under the decaying, blade wielding arms such that her crown dipped harrowingly close to the rotting carpet with each succession.

A twitch!

She halted, frozen like them. The Nurse directly before her was beginning to seize, its neck and head flipping out at wrong angles. Rain remained still, staring, unwilling to yield, but the thing would not stop. Suddenly, it stepped sideways, agitating the Nurse to its left, which retaliated with a swipe of her pipe.

Suddenly the gaggle erupted in frenzied movement. The sickening swipe of metal on flesh, inhuman screams piercing the air, they descended upon each other in blind fury. Rain leapt onto the floor to avoid their crazed attacks; the girl lost in a demented forest of twisting, lurching heels and legs. She skittered forward on her belly through their riot, emerging from the group she leapt to her feet and did exactly the wrong thing.

Run.

The heads of five demon Nurses snapped up in sync to the sound of scampering prey, and in a split second they became as if one multi-bodied, slashing entity. The dancer bolted, screaming around the corner, her hair flying, erupting towards the first outline of a door. Locked!

"FUCK! OH GOD!"

The Nurses whirled nearer to her, a flock of rusty blenders. Rain flew further down the hallway and tried the next one – jammed shut! She looked back, they were advancing closer! Suddenly her eyes spotted a sliver of weak light further down the hall, a door was slightly open. On bruised feet she bolted towards it, the Nurses following her footfalls like bloodhounds.

The noise was enough to wake anything up.

From behind her, the sound of something huge collided into her pursuers.

The sound of wet organs spilled onto the floor.

Rain's sheer terror reached a new level as she exploded into the room. From above her came the watery luminescence of the coils of two or three old fashioned incandescent bulbs emanating weakly from an electric candelabra infested with spider's webs. A grand piano was illuminated in the far corner beside a soiled silk chase. Seeing a closet down the nearest wall, she tore past a shredded room divider and flew inside, closing the doors as quietly as she could. She backed up as far as possible, clasping both bloody, sweaty hands around her lips quivering with hyperventilation.

_Oh god, oh god-_

Not here.

From inside the familiar slits of the double closet doors, she watched in horror as a Nurse entered the room, flying closer, mad with rage – hacking and slashing with a speed unnatural to its form. It approached, filling her entire field of vision, tearing nearer and nearer to the closet.

It stopped, inches away. Through the center of its torso emerged the tip of an enormous, rusted knife which was at least a foot across. Laced with congealed blood, the monstrous clip point of the hellish blade exploded through the doors of the closet, a mere fraction away from her nose, sending splinters flying all over her.

It slowly retracted. As if all other sounds in the world had vanished, her mind was filled to its brink with the magnified squeal of rusted steel slicing through tender flesh.

The Nurse fell onto her knees, dropping its hammer.

From behind her stood the figure of a colossal man. He stepped heavily into the weak light, the incarnation of death itself. Glinting faintly, she could see the massive muscles rippling underneath the filthy, stained flesh of his torso as he moved his muscular arm back; the gargantuan blade scraping its hair raising scream as it slid against the floor. The injured Nurse jerkily turned backwards to face him and in one foul sweep the beast snapped her up by her throat and held her high above him.

Where the creature's head should have been sat an abomination of iron and steel – a vast structure perched upon his shoulders, forged into a complex pyramidal form by wicked hands. Flatter in the back, immensely long and pointed in the front, its sharp blackened tip swept down past his navel, which was framed by a skirt of stapled human leather.

The Pyramid Head tilted its abstracted helm, surveying the wriggling demon. His knife dropped with a massive clang; he reached with his bloodstained hand and grasped powerfully at the fabric around the demon's pelvis. In one motion he ripped the sluttish dress off of her, sending it crashing into the divider. Her little hat fluttered to the ground, the creature desperately convulsed for freedom, but her captor held her with predatory resolve.

Pulling the twitching demi-female close, he pressed his torso against the monster and seemed to draw in her scent. For an unsettling moment, they looked as if two lovers caught in an embrace. He drew a hand over the demon's voluptuous breast, cupping his fingers over it. The Nurse lifted her head, cooing softly. With a sudden deafening growl, the Pyramid clenched his steely fingers over the unyielding flesh of the freezing corpse and tore the skin off of the monster in one fell swoop.

The torn bag of flesh smashed into the wall beside him so hard it cracked. The candelabra was sent swinging, throwing wild shadows over everything. The Great Tormentor tossed the twitching body aside as if it was made of rags. The girl in the closet had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, as the man in the pyramid descended his unearthly gaze onto something irrevocably new.

The Tormentor's fascination with his own power doubled as he looked upon the utterly helpless form of the horrified girl at his feet.

_So young…_

Her wide eyes glittered with beautiful tears as she knelt at his mercy, her frail arms embracing herself, unable to tear her shuddering gaze away from him. He stared down at her, entranced for a moment by the movement of veins lying just beneath her fragile female skin. With a quick motion he snapped her out of the closet, holding her with one immensely strong arm by her hand-span waist. He fingered the soft white silk of her dress, a fabric so thin it clung to her sweat-lined body like a second skin. This close, it left nothing to his imagination; the hardened tips of her small nipples pierced the chemise, surrounded by the mound of a delicate ever-budding breast.

_Fragile…_

Drawing her near, he took in her scent deeply. His eel-like tongue emerged, savoring the salt of the bead of sweat on her wrist, mixed with the heavy perfume of fresh blood. She was a garden for his senses; intoxicated, he savored the honey-sweet taste of failure, of misery, the multivariate flavors of self- hatred. He tipped his head back, high on the intricate notes of overlapping sins; her unrequited lust for a married man, the soul-wrenching loneliness of being an orphan, the guilt of witnessing her mother's violent suicide.

He opened her mind like a book, each memory his play thing. He saw the young girl in her pink princess bed, waking from nightmares, screaming for her mother to save her from the monster in the closet. He saw the happiness of her youth torn asunder by her father. Through the filter of her memories he could taste the man's veiled hatred for the girl. He saw the weekend getaways for the family to Silent Hill, to this very hotel, always the mother's idea. A montage of sickening happy memories of child and mother riding the Ferris wheel at the amusement park spattered with the monstrosities of the girl's father.

For years the Pyramid had been aware of her presence in his world. In her dreams she always came back to this room, flitting like a moth to the flame in to the very closet her father used to make her watch him fuck his mistress in. Always evading and never catching, she was finally within his grasp.

The Pyramid probed her thoughts mercilessly, delighting in her ingrained fear of the dark, the child's memories of her father railing his young nurse, throwing hateful glances at the sepulcher containing the child he never wanted. Pyramid head saw a six year old crying in silence, still in her tiny tutu, desperately holding onto the fantasy that one day, she would be a beautiful ballerina, dancing for royalty in a far away place.

His pleasure was overpowering. Each vivid memory was like a stroke along his shaft. He could have came right there, but this was a rare find indeed and he did not plan to waste it. Delving further, he spied her convoluted feelings about the professor she barely knew, saw the man's hands slipping up and down the keys of the piano.

If he had lips, he would have smiled. He knew just best how to break her.

The Tormentor took her with both hands and dragged her across the room. Her struggling was pathetic, her fists beating his chest with barely more than a tickle. She didn't realize it was only exciting him further. He set her upon the top of the piano and in an instant, demonic wires emerged from its depths to restrain her at the limbs and throat. Under the power of their master, this king of obscenity, two more wires snaked out of the recesses of the instrument and wound their way around her tender thighs, pulling them wide open. Sensing his intention, the young woman pleaded desperately with the monster in her miniature voice with no avail.

Pleased with the brutal irony of his handwork, the great predator advanced upon the powerless girl. Her eyes widened in terror as she watched his member emerge from the depths of his clothing on its own accord, bursting between the staples of his skirt. It was frightfully large, with a vicious point at the head that resembled his sinister helmet. She felt the coarseness of his blackened hands grip her around the waist, pulling her close to him, tightening the wires. She could smell him this close, a cocktail of sex, rust, and sulfur.

The Pyramid aligned himself with her, nearly shivering with depraved euphoria. She was so _warm._ The sadist snaked his member up her soft thigh, edging under her now slatternly shift, penetrating the supple folds of her moist opening. As he probed further, as if his day couldn't possibly get any better, he soon discovered she was still untouched.

This surprised the sadist, with the thoughts she had harbored for the pianist he thought she had already known him, or any man for that matter. The girl cried out in pain – that horrific point. Her tormentor was beyond elated, he had dreamed of the day when he would have the rapture of desecrating something truly pure. So sick of rotten nurses and mannequins was he, putrid holes that felt no pain or pleasure. Only a human could fully appreciate the perverse mastery of his art.

He pushed in, sickeningly slow and deliberate, tearing through the membrane as leisurely as he possibly could. The girl shrieked in agony, tears streaming down her perfect face. He grabbed a handful of her luxuriant black hair and did it again, her cries intensifying. With satisfaction he did it again, and again, savoring the screams which only made him harder. Blood leaked out from their junction. With a dirty finger, he dipped it into the pool of crimson, held it up to her face and plunged it between her pretty lips.

_Do it._

Obediently, the female sucked. Her warm slippery tongue tried to evade his skin but of course this was impossible.

_Do I remind you of your father?_

Coursing with shame, she tightly closed her eyes and tried to pretend she was somewhere else. He grasped her dainty chin and made her look at him. He thrusted again, harder. Her guilt was positively luscious to him; her eyes opened slowly, scintillating silver in the darkness, wreathed in tears. But he was a merciless creature.

_You cannot lie to me, child._

She would not comply, he could sense her mind straining, unable to admit the horror of her repressed past. He penetrated remorselessly, slipping it nearly all of the way out and then forcing it back in, setting her broken membrane ablaze with white hot agony. She was so exquisitely beautiful to him in this moment, impaled at the end of him, on the Tormentor she had summoned to punish her own guilt-wracked psyche. Little did she know that it was her own hand that placed the pyramidal crown upon the monster's head, that it was she who had begged him in the dark to feed not off of her flesh, but her human soul.

_Say it._

Slipping his hand deeper into her soft black hair he pulled with just shy of the force necessary to rip it from her skull. She let out piercing scream, her voice wrecked and cracking with tears she screamed the words he had placed in her mind.

"_Forgive me Father for I have sinned!"_

She could hear him laughing in her mind, she wept openly as he took her violently on the piano, unable to hold back any longer. He tore off her slip. Utterly exposed the wires lacerated her body, yet never enough to kill her. The Pyramid violated her pitilessly, slamming her onto him over and over. There was nothing she could do, no protest she could make. He made it last. Laughing quietly to himself, he would come to a stop, look her in the eyes, and start again, with completely sadistic relentlessness. This went on for hours, exhausting her, until in a final act of supreme malevolence he snapped the wires restraining her. He took her drained hands and placed them around his own shoulders, pushed her head beside his helmet and raped her in his arms.

In a moment of pure, ringing, unadulterated ecstasy the Pyramid had his orgasm. Streams of black semen poured out of them onto the floor. Clasping the female close, he steadied himself against the piano. Almost gently, he lifted her chin. Unconscious. Laying her indelicately on the ruined chase, the monster tucked himself away and rested for a moment, reveling in his work.

He let the afterglow wash over him. His hand gathering his great knife, the hellish gears of his mind turning away until the perfect solution revealed itself to him. Gathering her and throwing her over his shoulder with one arm, knife dragging behind him, he left the room where she had lost her innocence twice. He mused for a moment, what a shame it was that she wasn't awake, for he wanted to be painfully cognizant for what he would do to her next.


	4. Consecration

Chapter 4: Consecration

Her eyes opened, congealed with sweat and tears. From deep within their sockets her grey eyes ached, burning with exhaustion. At a glacier's pace she raised her wavering vision. Staring emotionlessly into the wretched space before her, the prisoner observed her environment almost passively.

All around her was the indistinct sound of the dull roar of flames unseen spare the omnipresence of their livid crimson glow; the churning, guttural sounds of the grinding of massive gears; the internal sounds of hell itself. She was incarcerated within a hanging cage, her wrists bound with heavy chains, raised high above her. Her head stooped low, black tresses languid, she wore nothing and was given no scrap of fabric to spare her dignity. Her narrow thighs forced indelicately into the rusting iron, warmed only by the flames licking up from impossibly far below the grated floor. The walls were paneled with peeling steel, bare in places to reveal a meshwork of barbed wire enveloping the whole massive space. On every surface the instruments of torture glittered in the ombre glow of hell-light; razors, knives, cleavers, spreaders, forceps, drills, chains and all sorts of things of shapes she did not care to discern.

She was his plaything now, his dirty porcelain doll; for how long, she could no longer remember. He threw water on her occasionally – burning hot to cleanse the filth that clung to her mortal flesh in his prison of the senses, just to watch her pliant shell blush red before he sullied her again. Her mind was nothing of its former self. Tears rimmed her eyes but none fell. Darkened memories resided now only in the most derelict and obscured corners of her forgotten mind like sun bleached photographs flung into murky water. Faces evaded her, reflecting now only as images of asymmetrical flesh. Once familiar voices had deformed into ambient noise, their words and significance all but lost. The girl was nearly empty; all elbows, knees, hair, eyes, and pallor.

She did not start when the massive double doors unhinged their web of quivering flesh and chains with a repellent snapping, the whole wretched structure wrought for the figure too large to be human alone. He arrived, framed by the door for a moment; her eyes fixed upon him immediately. It was a sight impossible to ignore; from chest to waist his demonic form was scintillating with rivers of fresh blood. Long tendrils of gleaming crimson slid in rivulets down the valleys of his abdomen. He was flush, his unnatural skin glowing with perspiration. The Pyramid entered; the great doors fell shut behind him. In one hand he grasped his wicked knife, listlessly dragging in his wake, screeching its tortured wail; in the other was the throat of a still living feral, yelping pitifully, entrails seeping out of its livid gut wound. He tossed the heavy blade aside; with his mighty arm the king of demons raised the pitiful beast higher and in a flash brutally snapped its hind legs back against the natural angle of the joint. The canine howled horrifically, not enough to spare it from the Pyramid, who smashed it down upon a broad iron table like a hammer to a nail.

He twisted his atrocious helm back toward his doll, watching her lovely eyes widen. Regardless of the extent of his measures, she still had not completely lost her human fear.

He descended upon the cage, slowly, soaking in the quivering of her lips that grew with each heavy step of his bare feet. The ivy of razor-wire that confined the lock of the maiden's cage slipped away as the door creaked open. She cringed, shrinking as far from him as possible – useless. Slipping his massive hand into the silken mass of her hair, he threw her out in one movement, sending the frail human colliding into the grated floor.

Stars exploded before her eyes; the sudden impulse to vomit, acid in her mouth. Innumerable scratches, handprints and welts gleamed orange from the snowy canvas of the dancer's insubstantial flesh. She snapped her matted head back - he towered over her, his black shadow dissolving her senses. The girl scrambled forward pathetically on atrophied hands and knees with the great monster on her heels, viciously composed. She clambered towards the door, hearing the heavy footfalls of her tormentor leisurely approaching. Her hands searched the terrible doors desperately.

No handle.

She whipped around – the Pyramid mercilessly lunged for her throat and lifted her as easily as a rag doll. Suffocating, her head lolled back, legs kicking – he tossed her again like a bag of garbage. She hit the floor, again, this time spitting up blood. Her eyes flashed, pale lips spattered incarnadine - parted with unadulterated rage into an unmistakable snarl. Her face was contorted into sharpened fury, her eyes black with hate – he was _fucking_ with her, batting her around for pleasure, doing what he knew he could get away with in this uneven contest.

Just like dad.

"FUCK YOU!" she spat, teeth gnashing bestially, elbows bent at sharp angled as he descended on her again. His huge hand, rough as sandpaper, viced around her tiny throat again. With a huge amount of satisfaction The Pyramid again lifted her, enamored with the fight boiling over in her, almost laughing.

Not again.

In a split second she twisted her head around at an ungainly angle and sunk her teeth deep into his steely forearm. Completely shocked, the great monster let out an inhuman shriek – her hand blindly grasped the handle of one of the long devices glittering on the walls and in flash with every ounce of her remaining strength she plunged a dagger into his collar.

He dropped her, screaming and staggering back, the beast's hand clutching at the jagged knife jutting out of his body. In an instant she was on her feet, flying towards the only thing in the room that had a hair's chance of saving her – the executioner's own blade. Flooding with hot adrenaline, her mind exploding in pain but balancing on her razor like focus she pulled the massive blade up, - the blade larger than she- and pointed it at the monster.

Mouth dripping with blood, eyes wreathed in fire, she advanced on him, defying gravity, her delicate frame contorted demonically over the gleaming black sword of death. The king of demons could not believe his sight as we watched this ruined female rise like a blood-soaked specter, the pyres of hell burning in her eyes; this perverse abomination of fragility wielding the blade of the strong. With a blistering roar she lunged at him like an animal - he twisted - the clip point seared into his oblique, spilling his monstrous blood onto the grated floor. Enraged she swung the blade back around – he caught it in his hand. Howling in wrath she pushed with all of her might, saliva falling from her bared teeth, but it was to no avail. In a second the demon's untold power worked its way into the blade, burning it searing hot. With a ruthless shriek the girl relentlessly held on, the flesh on her hands steaming, befouling the air. The Pyramid wrapped his other hand around the top of the blade and ripped it from her hands in a mighty strike, the force sending her crashing to the floor. He threw the knife furiously into the wall, throwing his hands around her minute waist in an instant. She thrashed in his grasp, wriggling madly, slicing away at him with her nails. She tipped her head back, jet black hair clinging to her white skin, face hideously distorted with wrath.

Holding her high, he once again tasted her. The image of her writhing in his hands with her scorching eyes, with lips seething in his own blood running in tendrils onto her ice white breasts burned into his mind. Was this the same female who had lain so quietly as he raped her pitilessly over sheets of human leather night after night? Was this she who had only wept with absolute silence when he had torn rotted and living flesh indiscriminately from her wounds, only to force it through her lips? What she once was now gone, bled of every last drop of her innocence, he had indeed seen to that. In real time the Pyramid saw her fractured, weak mind ripping open into a cosmic chasm of abject blackness, her thousands and thousands of memories screaming in unison, each demon finding its voice in her own as her humanity was brought to its knees before the crowning of the goddess of vengeance.

She locked eyes with him. They could both hear the sirens. Silently, the pact was made.

He could almost smell the burning of her soul.

He smashed her onto a table. All manner of mechanical arms ejected out of it for their master, each unfolding an array of hideously irregular and unclean razors, needles, and wires. In a flash she was restrained, wires snaking around her limbs, holding them fast against the bloodstained metal. The blood red hell-light intensified, glinting off of the tormentor's massive pyramidal helm, the whole room sighing like a living organism. The grated floor shimmered like water; from the feet of The Pyramid the fabric of the Otherworld twisted illogically, writhing in a swirl of wires and blackness until out of its hellish obscura emerged a box wrought of human flesh, wrenched shut with a halo of nine inch nails. In a moment the great knife was back in his hand. He lifted it slowly, its absurdly long blade gleaming, singing to him. He looked back at her, his helm scintillating.

Obediently the wires snaked forward again. The girl screamed in torment as they cut deeply into her white flesh as her slender legs were pushed to their full extent by the animate razor-wire. Pyramid Head lifted his blade high. By a twisted force of habit she pointed her toes at the moment that he took the only thing a ballerina needs more than her life.

Her feet.


	5. Metastasis

Chapter 5: Metastasis

Itzak set the single long-stem rose onto the bedside table tenderly. In the absolutely desaturated canvas of the hospital, only two definite colors stood out; the deep, blushed crimson of the lone rose and the somber black of Rain's obsidian hair. His brow furrowed, mystified; he barely knew her and yet he was the only person who had come to see her for the two months she had slept. The man sat wearily, his camel trenchcoat around him, hands clasped, his sky blue eyes fixed on the laying girl; concerned, perplexed, wordless.

She was as fragile as glass, the watery fluorescent light washing her of all color. From beneath the paper thin veil of the formless hospital gown he could see she was thinning; her delicate form becoming gelatin like, transparent, insubstantial, as if all that remained of her might simply be blown away. Her mass of jet hair had grown like a weed, blanketing her shoulders and breasts, falling in streams into to crook of her elbow, entwining amidst the needles and tubes.

He received the call nearly four weeks ago. Sitting at the piano, fountain pen paused over the sheet music, Natasya had handed him the phone, her sharp face bearing a suspicious expression. He was called in for questioning and couldn't leave for hours; he couldn't tell the police enough that he had barely knew the girl, he did her a favor once – tried to fix her up with an audition with a colleague, she sat in on his class everyday– and no, he never had sex with the girl, no, he did not know how or why she had pictures of him under her pillow and Jesus Christ- no, no he did not know why or how she had suddenly fell comatose, found among rats and cockroaches only when her landlord unlocked her door to personally claim her two month late rent.

With no sign of forced entry, with no indications of rape, no hint of poison, disease, with spotless blood and a clean MRI, not even the doctors could understand how a 23 year old woman could simply fall asleep and not wake up. She did not respond to a single stimulus; not to pain, sound or even light. Itzak grew disturbed looking at her, illuminated with a bluish tint. It was like staring at a living corpse. He turned away, his skin crawling. The girl literally had absolutely no one; during the short investigation the police found she was an orphan two times over. Her papers had her registered as an infant in an orphanage in a town called Shepard's Glen, where she had been adopted by an out of state couple. In her sixteenth year her adopted mother had committed suicide by razor, found crumpled in a closet according to police reports. Neglecting custody, her father soon disappeared, ending up dead a year later of a cerebral aneurism. A ward of the state, her history faded as she was passed from institution to institution, house to house until her emancipation.

Fliers went up around the campus, but no one knew her. Upon further investigation it was discovered she was never even a student.

His expression softened. While he was averse and even ashamed of the girl's apparent fascination with him, the professor felt deep pity in his heart. She danced so beautifully, with such profound feeling, he mourned for her poignant vulnerability, her abject loneliness. As an immigrant, one who had been alone most of his life, he had compassion for this stranger because he understood what it was like to live in a world where no one cared even ask your name.

As the investigation drew to a close, and there wasn't a drop of foul play to be found, Itzak had asked the landlord to have a look around the two tiny rooms in which the girl had lived to try and decipher what had happened. Begrudgingly, he had been given the key and one day to get to the bottom of it.

Itzak pulled the slip of paper out of his pocket with his gloved hand and read the address over again, making sure for the thousandth time it was right in his mind. His eyes still on her, he set it back into his pocket. Standing, he approached her. Even near death, her face carried whispers of her sad beauty. He touched the back of her hand, though ascetically, and made the silent promise that he would find the root of her sickness.

* * *

The key turned into the stubborn lock, yielding at last with a resounding metallic click. His long hand slid around the antique doorknob and turned it open. When he walked in, the pianist, so accustomed to the bright and fine things in life, was humbled at how this child had lived. Before him was a single room, bitterly cold and completely empty of furniture. He stepped slowly into it, each floor board creaking weakly beneath his shoes. Directly before him stood a stove, a sink, and a dilapidated refrigerator in a row beside a tiny cabinet. It was almost absolutely lightless. Looking up he saw a long metallic cord. He pulled it, it flicked on, but the bulb immediately blew out in a bluish flash, eerily exploding the room in light for a fraction of the second. His eyes turned to the single window to his right. He fumbled over to it and pulled the cord on the bare, dusty aluminum blinds.

Nothing but the anonymous brick face of the adjacent building could be seen through it. Not even the sky.

Growing unsettled, he slowly let the blinds fall back shut. He shivered very slightly; he didn't like it here, alone in the dark. He produced a small penlight from the folds of his coat and turned it on; a pinprick of white in the gathering shade. Pieces of paper caught his eye, previously obscured by the darkness. He knelt; there in the middle of the floor was a pair of shears, needles, thread and layers upon layers of black silk tulle. Printouts of basic sewing patterns were scattered across the floor boards. He started, almost yelping; directly before him the ghostly stark white outline of a dressmaker's mannequin emerged seemingly out of the dark itself, wearing the hand-sewn tutu she had worn to the rehearsal. Its crystals glittered oddly in the dark, making it almost look wet.

Itzak lowered his flashlight, but his heart would not calm down. He back away from the mannequin, keeping an eye on it. Although the thought was irrational, he had the unerring feeling it was watching him, as appeared to be her out of the periphery of his vision.

He attempted to put these strange thoughts out of his mind. Itzak marched into the kitchenette, determined. He began methodically searching what few drawers there were, finding only receipts, old bills, broken pens and rotting food. With absolutely nothing useful in the kitchenette, he extended his search back into the living room. He opened the coat closet; he found it very odd to see nothing in it whatsoever. He shined his light within the empty space. Nothing. Not even a hanger. Growing more uncomfortable by the second, he approached the center of the room.

"Where did she sit?" He wondered, seeing no couch or chair. His light shone upon a closed door near the window. Swallowing, he crossed the room again, determined to keep his eyes away from the lone mannequin. He put his hand around the handle and pushed. The room inside was completely black; It was like peering into a mouth. Perturbed he slid his hand against the inside wall and – _thank god_ – found a switch. From high above a single light bulb flicked on in a space so silent he could hear the sound of the filament buzzing. He squinted; the light was so dim he had to keep his penlight on. Before him was what appeared to be a bedroom. The floor was much more decrepit in here, from use it appeared. In the center of the room, pushed against the far wall was a single twin mattress. His blood grew to ice when he noticed that amidst the sparse sheets he could still see the outline of a woman upon its grayish folds. There was nothing on the walls, only a metal hook from which hung a decaying leather bag and a single black purse.

Trying to beat back his anxiety about this place, he stepped forward and realized that he had trod on something. He lifted his foot; beneath it laid the sateen surface of a ballet pointe shoe. Bending over, he picked it up and examined it. He could see that underneath the inky black remained traces of its original peach color. Ever since he was a boy, he had always thought these objects to be beautiful, these silken cages for the female foot; his fingers slipped amorously through the long obeisant ribbons which slid like hair in his hands.

Suddenly his hand was on fire, he felt as if he had just been shot in the palm. In searing pain he let out a small cry. Startled, he violently shook it with several flicks of his wrist.

_Smack._

An enormous jet black spider splattered onto the floor. It had a sickly triangular abdomen that was easily the length of a half-dollar. Horrified, he dropped the slipper; to his disgust the spider righted itself from its prone position with much vile twitching of its black needle legs and suddenly jumped toward him. He pounced back, stomping his foot forward. He missed – the spider skittered off on lightening quick legs. With his hand glowing hotly from the probably poisonous bite the man lunged after it right before it disappeared beneath the lip of a closet door.

He pulled on the handle. Locked.

He knitted his brow. Hadn't the police been here?

Out of his pocket he retrieved the key. He fitted it into the hole and turned. Itzak slowly opened the peeling door. It was pitch black inside and just like the previous closet, it appeared to be entirely empty. He tossed a glance over his shoulder; across from the bed on the wall opposing him was a small sterlite box. He approached it warily and opened the top drawer, catching a glimpse of luxurious lingerie before he snapped it shut out of embarrassment. Pretending not to have seen what he did, he fumbled through the other drawers finding what appeared to be her clothing there.

He stood up and turned around, his mind turning. His azure eyes flicked from the sterlite drawers to her closet. It caught him as extremely strange that she had stored absolutely nothing in the closet. Looking around the floor and seeing only the occasional broken pointe shoe tossed here or there, he sank down onto the mattress, feeling defeated. He put his head in his hand for a moment; his lit penlight slipped off of his lap and rolled onto the floor, pointing its thin ray into the closet. Listlessly, he stood up and went to fetch it. When his hand touched the cold metal, his eyes fell across the placement of the beam and Itzak froze. High in the upper left hand corner of the closet there was a the very, very faint outline of a 2 by 2 foot square cut into the wallpaper. It was almost impossible to see; completely hidden in plain sight. His eyes fixed on this anomaly, Itzak rose slowly, approaching the square apprehensively. The closet was freezing cold.

Placing the penlight between his lips, Itzak reached his hands up and felt around the perimeter of the square. He managed to wedge his fingertip in between the seam and the wall and pulled. The drywall pulled forward on a hinge of wallpaper. Inside was a deep black cavity. The slick edge of a very tattered plastic binder glistened in the light. With slightly quivering hands, Itzak extracted the object and opened it.

It seemed to be a picture album of sorts. On the very first page he saw a picture of a family. A woman who looked as if she was of Asian descent had her arms around the shoulders of an extremely small, smiling girl. Both were wearing white winter coats, surrounded by floating snow, hair caught flowing in the cold breeze forever in time; embracing happily. Even through the mask of time Itzak recognized Rain's features; he instantly realized he was looking at pictures of her family, the pretty Asian woman was probably her adopted mother. He flipped the page; another photograph of the mother and child, in a field of flowers. The next, at an amusement park, taken close up to the camera, held by the mother. From behind them he could see where the sky and the ground met, for they were up high in a Ferris wheel.

"Why did she hide this?" He asked no one.

There were dozens of pages like this, but each time he flipped to the next he became more and more aware of how a father figure was absent from each image. Puzzled, he flipped back to the first page. There. He could see the indistinct shadow of a man holding a camera, etched blue into the snow. Furrowing his brow, he flipped through the images over and over again but aside from this strange fact he could discern absolutely no clue. The images ended halfway through the book, but he did not give up. He flipped through the blank pages. Suddenly he stopped - something was caught between two pages. It was a piece of cardstock with a good sized hole cut in it. His fingers grasped the smooth parchment; holding it up to the light.

"Do Not Disturb. Courtesy of the Grand Hotel, Silent Hill"

Silent Hill.

The Russian scribbled down the name onto his piece of paper. No where to go now but there.


	6. Simulacra

Chapter 6: Simulacra

He had gone off of the road. He awoke suddenly, jerking the wheel out of a terrified reflex. Itzak's eyes darted around for a moment as he had a spasm – he was completely disoriented. The last thing he remembered was driving endless highway roads in the middle of the night; the only thing to look at being the stark yellow line in the pitch black void before him, solely illuminated headlights. Sighing with the relief that he had somehow managed to drift off of the road without crashing, Itzak wiped the condensation off of the windshield of his shining black Audi.

He wiped harder. Harder.

He could see nothing before him but exanimate grey mist.

The man instinctively reached into his pocket for his cell phone. His heart turned to ice when he realized that something was horribly wrong with it. It isn't every day that three hundred dollar electronics spontaneously produce nothing but static. Futilely he tried to fuss with it, holding it upwards to catch a signal; the device displayed or responded to nothing, emitting naught save the ominous sonance of electrical interference to accompany him in the colorless cloud.

Deadzone.

Itzak turned the ignition. And then he turned it again. He tried a third time, and then a fourth, fifth, and sixth. He smashed his hand against the steering wheel, bursting the tight chartreuse ball of pus that had formed where the spider had bitten him. The pianist burst into a quick howl of pain and surprise; he pressed his good hand against the wound, spilling out the rest of the poison, applying pressure, perspiring hotly. It glopped thickly onto his camel coat – he batted away at it, only pushing the viscous fluid deeper into the wool. Itzak felt a stab of panic welling inside him; his eyes darted– he could not tell what time of day it was. He uselessly played with his broken phone once more before realizing sadly that it was entirely castrate, ultimately he slipped it into his pocket and forgot about it. Raising his hand to his head, he wiped away the sweat and tried to calm himself; acting foolishly would only get him more lost. At last the man of music decided that staying within an unresponsive vehicle in the middle of the mist was going to get him nowhere. Begrudgingly and against his instincts, he naively stepped out through the supernal veil of the real and that which lies concealed.

His great muscles fired; The Tormentor swung. Simultaneous with the clash of metal on metal rang inconsolable human screaming blended with the hiss of blood rushing through iron mesh. A small pair of female feet hit the savage floor with an unobtrusive thud. The Pyramid observed coldly as her body contorted in agony, her sharp narrow waist arcing obscenely far from her bound limbs, her still gleaming hair obscuring the shattered white plane of her wailing face.

He wanted nothing more than to touch her, to reach out and feel the fiery skin clinging desperately to the last throes of life with his fingertips, with his palm. Remember that this impossible creature blinded by his helm did not need eyes to see.

And see he did.

The great pyramid was weakened in his desire; he leaned against his knife, knees growing soft, hypnotized by the rich incarnadine scent of life itself flooding out of its mortal envelope. The air was saturated with it; his heavy footfalls piercing her screams as he went to her, unable to contain himself, wicked knife dragging, his brutal hand outstretched – grasping for his fragile female. He had want for almost nothing in this flu-dream of hell, for he was its undisputed king; the master of nightmares, the bringer of rust and pain. He is the tangible darkness, the death of sunlight, the antithesis of the human conscious; in the shadows man fears the demons, but in those shadows the demons fear Him.

Almost nothing. Almost.

He is preceded by the scrape of steel on iron, the sirens of a torn reality, invited to manifest in flesh by the black terrors of a psyche whispering for its own punishment. Upon his heavy shoulders he carries the pyramidal weight of mans' most vile acts as Atlas carries the world; even the gods are subject to retribution, to the reciprocal price of their own power held in the blind hand of justice. As long as there is sin to hide in the dark, there will be an Executioner.

Out of her mind, her life grew weaker as her hate took solid form. With the gift of blood, every demonic dream hiding in the black recesses her mind was freed into the waking world. She could not see her appendages feeding the floor wrought of living wire; the blackened virgin's life blood gorging the metalliferous vines of darkness like water to a razor-spun weed. The very fabric of the Otherworld twisted, orgasmic, rapturous in the inundation of human carnage; nothing remained solid as her blood began to hemorrhage from the very walls in a violent flux. The last of the sacrifice slipped beneath the undulating waves of the gathering hell mouth.

Her voice lost, she ceased screaming. She rolled her head over, blue with death, her helpless gaze locking with the Pyramid just as his shuddering hand reached for her lips. A voice pealed into her mind, a whisper.

_Give me this… one last time._

The knife clattered to the ground. The beast reached with both hands, almost pitifully, clasping to the only other voice in the rusted prison that held even its king captive. For all of his evil, for all of his wicked crimes, the Tormentor himself lay tormented; mans' punisher punished, by a twist of fate, by man.

Her pale lips cracked into the slightest of expressions. A sickly smile upon ashen lips.

"You'll never have me."

Reality shifted.

They were no longer alone.

All light faded save for the unhallowed phosphorescence of the fires of hell burning from far beneath. Out of the blackness itself emerged the Reaper, the Child of Vengeance; manifesting untouched in the rain of blood, her cold white face alone aglow in her eclipse, the mask of the lamb she once was.

The Pyramid stopped in his tracks, lowering his helm from the burning eyes of the only thing greater than him in the world of the damned – its architect. The child's omnipotent glance seared past his armor, slicing deep into the hollow space at the heart of his blackness.

A child's playful voice pierced the silence.

"Stand fast, my eager Rapist. Cannot your desire ever be satisfied?"

As mighty as he was, the Pyramid could not bear his creator's eyes. It was like staring into the sun.

"Let us see what you have brought me."

The Goddess tilted her head curiously, surveying the lying female before her; the offering. The Goddess ran two tiny fingers through the victim's river of onyx hair and closed her eyes, smiling very slightly.

"My lovely knight, why can't you understand? Children should be protected."

Soundlessly Alessa extended a single index finger and touched her offering, once, upon the surface of the mind's eye.

Their minds met.

For the first time in her life, the girl known as Rain felt no fear.

One can only scream so long. There are only so many tears that can fall until each drop loses its meaning, its memory fading to shadow and salt. Blood may indeed be thicker than water, but it freezes just the same. If time will pass without the presence of hope, the inevitability of the loss of the human soul is as desperately futile as the offering of sustenance to a cut rose. Once severed from the ground, life is but a flourish reduced to thorn and ash.

Rain's blood streaked eyes fell shut for the last time as the final remnant of her mortal soul evanesced into the waiting arms of her deepest Mephistophelian desire.

Her lips surrendered their last living breath as her conscience let slip its struggle; passing sweetly into oblivion.

Death.

Alessa slowly turned her head to her knight, her smile satanic, the childs' innocent face peeling away to show its true form, eyes glittering red-rimmed black in her empire of rust. Black teeth smiling, she advanced upon The Pyramid who was cemented to where he stood. With every step of her tiny foot, the weight of the helm increased tenfold – white hot agony exploded into him; howling in agony the master became the submissive, doubling over, he desperately clawed at the weight in a weak attempt to rip it off.

"You couldn't see, could you? She could have been yours, trapped here by the tumor that wedged shut the open door between dreams and consciousness. All alone in your garden of corpses I gave you a rose, and you ripped it apart petal by petal."

His skin seared – he screamed horrifically, inhumanly, as the helmet became wreathed in flame.

The huge male cowered before child, his massive body tearing with the inferno she pitilessly inflicted upon him. The Goddess laughed with pure joy as she watched him writhe, the tormentor's flesh bubbling and peeling in the undying flames of the Demon's hatred.

"You, the strong, the great, who loves to inflict pain upon the weak, CANNOT EVEN STAND A FRACTION OF WHAT WAS FELT BY A CHILD!"

He desperately howled, crawling forward, limbs jerking wildly; the Pyramid reached for his knife, but upon touching his hand the Goddess turned it to ash.

"_Never_ forget why you are here!" She hissed, voice transformed, "_Never _forget that every ounce of the power that you consider yours is _mine_."

In a flash, the flames extinguished.

"_Never forget that you too are damned."_

Smoldering, the great tormentor clung to the grated floor like a worm beneath the true weight of the pyramid upon his shoulders, stripped of every atom of his might.

With a disgusted look and a curled lip, the child walked spitefully over his back to the cold female body on the table. By her unseen hand, the box of flesh and nails upon its pedestal of living wire beside her slowly opened.

The Gift.

"My child, you will live again. Beyond your blackest dreams… you will live again." Said Alessa gently, her small hand softly stroking Rain's lifeless face.

"This, I bequeath to you."


	7. Simulation

Chapter 7: Simulation

There was nothing to be seen. The mist was impenetrable, impregnable, alive and dead, an entity all its own. Itzak walked from the rear wheel of his car forward. He was perspiring, sweating, his heart tripping over itself in crushing, mounting anxiety.

How long had he been walking?

He tossed a look over his shoulder, picking up the pace, the same as he had done a dozen times. The car had disappeared into the grey long ago. Now he checked his watch, the same as he had done two dozen times before, and once again he found no solace in the same answer that he had reached in each of those instances – that it had stopped inexplicably at 3:33 a.m.

He couldn't say why he was afraid, why he pulled his heavy coat around him even though his skin tasted nothing.

There! There was something glistening ahead. He broke into a full run, his spirit soaring at the sudden change in the tableau of road and fog. But as he neared it, something deep and fundamental inside him stirred and his feet ceased running.

After a solid minute of staring without cease, Itzak came to realize that he was staring at the headlights of his own car.

"… _impossible…_"

The car door in the distance before him opened. Helplessly the man watched _himself_ exit the vehicle, turn, and calmly walk away, dissolving into the distant mist.

Silence.

He never ran as fast as he did then.

Itzak didn't stop when he reached the tail lights of his car, not even as he superseded it. In fact, the only thing that stopped him was the first street sign that he had seen in hours.

"Welcome to Silent Hill"

Heaving, he caught his chest, breathing painfully, his tendons screaming, mouth wide agape, vision utterly captured by the sign, its bonelike letters offering no answer in their green spaces.

The wildest explanations of his psyche couldn't explain what he had just seen. Quiet terror paralyzed his attempt to venture back. So rather, he went forward, gritting his teeth, pulling the trench coat still tighter. He could not think; all of his thoughts were utterly erased by the sheer inconceivability of what he had just witnessed. He feebly reached into his pocket, searching with clattering hands for a cigarette. He had left them in the car.

"Damn…"

He was not going back. It is amazing how powerfully the human mind can bind to denial in the presence of irrationality. Itzak found himself alone on a street which had opened into the murky vision of a town. He picked up the pace; on either side of him he could see the teeth of shattered fences glinting in the grayness, their "Do Not Enter" signs pushing quietly against his presence. Beneath Itzak's feet, thick blades of gnarled grass had begun to sprout from in between the cracks of the ruined concrete; how they did this without the presence of sunlight was a secret shared only by the most pallid denizens of the world's dark places. The man looked upwards. The sky was entirely veiled by the cinereal mist which blanketed everything. It's colorlessness suffocated him, his eyes thirsted for color; wine red, egg blue, all defunct in this endless expanse of obscurity. Every surface was indistinct; he could barely read the peeling letters on the facades of the long abandoned shops flanking his left and right.

After a while, he turned slightly, walking past some knocked over trash bins to cross onto the sidewalk to attempt to pry into one of the storefronts.

Something on the sidewalk caught his eye. Itzak stopped. He knelt down, examining a reddish-brown stain upon the ashen asphalt. Over time he came to the realization that he was staring at what was obviously "fresh" dried blood in a completely abandoned town. Something inside him stirred, he suddenly felt ice cold - his skin welted up around his hairs. The word tumbled thoughtlessly out of his lips.

"…..Rain?"

He snapped erect, azure eyes searching, the lines in his face deepening inward. There was the panic again, theiced horror that he could barely restrain.

"Are you here?''

The city was unresponsive. The man shuddered, pulling again at his coat, a touch obsessively. His calm veneer had cracked.

He called her name. Nothing.

"I'm losing goddamn mind."

He ran his hands through his longish hair, lips parted in incredulity, staring at the stain. People couldn't be two places at once, they just couldn't. His mind was bereft of answers. He was pissed.

"_Helping strangers, look where it got me…"_

But words couldn't change a thing.

Defeated, his eyes fell once more upon the aged concrete. Itzak saw that the blood splatter lead away towards the pavement before him. He burst into a jog, his neurons firing, his system absolutely screaming for nicotine; he followed the trail of blood dutifully for the pure lack of any superior bearing. He followed the lengthening stains and drips that appeared to have been left by a wound while moving until he came to a set of crumbling stone steps beneath a flickering neon marquis.

His mouth fell open. He plunged his hand into his breast pocket and slowly extracted the tattered blue door tab.

"_The Grand Hotel…"_

Itzak's eyes surveyed the steps and he recoiled instinctively. Three foot scratch marks were etched into the solid stone. The trail of blood lead up to crumbling double doors that had long since lost their grandeur; the brass handle glittered from beneath a sickly red-brown handprint. Itzak approached it as though cancerous, forcing himself up the stairs, avoiding looking at the deep-etched scratches, and placed his hand over the print for size.

His stomach sank. The handprint was definitively small.

His skin growing cold, crawling, every single sense protesting – his hand moved upward, drawn to handle as if by a magnet. His fingers once again clasped around another frosty handle, another unfamiliar door, another bad situation.

It turned.

He closed his eyes, focusing on the cold metal, not knowing what was on the other side. Exhaling deeply, he calmed himself, and made the call.

It opened.

As the door shut behind him, every last ounce of light dissipated out of the room. Itzak was standing alone in the pitch blackness. Slowly, he reached inside of his coat and retrieved his last lifeline, the penlight. The darkness parted from its small but resilient beam; biting his lip, gritting his teeth, Itzak breathed again, focusing on the narrow path of illumination before him and thrust himself again into the unknown, damned if he was going to give up now. Swallowing his fear he broke back into a jog, in pursuit of the blood. He was lead out into a great hall; the feeble light of his penlight dissolved in the enveloping darkness. The walls themselves were falling apart, the sagging ceiling was stained with moisture seeping down from above, rebar jutted in places like the blackened skeleton of some hideous ancient behemoth – casting twisted shadows over the balding carpet. Although he shivered to his core, the man would not betray his pride.

The whole place smelled wrong. His nose wrinkled upwards, sensing something hideous in the air. Itzak crossed the room surgically, one foot before the other, his senses alive, inching towards the haggard lift that stared at him from across the space. The button was blood splattered; his skin crawled as he shone his light upon the broken, unlit button and spied more panicked female handprints of dried blood. He craned his head upwards toward the empty shaft; the elevator had stopped on one of the floors above him, completely obscured by the solid sheet of gloom thickly clinging to every surface.

A bloodcurdling wail pierced him to the soul.

Ears ringing, Itzak jumped nearly three feet into the air. Upon landing, he stumbled, his heart beating wildly; instantly he was drenched in sweat, without thinking he called out-

"RAIN!"

Silence.

"RAIIIN!"

Although in his state he had no sure way of knowing in what direction the cry had originated from, Itzak exploded towards the double doors to his left. Emulsified with rubble, Itzak began to wildly tear away at stone, filth, and spare wood with his bare hands, ripping towards the doors as fast as he possibly could. At last he heard it again – helplessly he paused, ears shattered once more by an unmistakably female scream; a long, pained howl cracked by an audible sob. He slammed his ear against the door, his body racing, feeling as if he couldn't get enough air, he was sure of it now – against all reason _she _was in there.

He called her name, helplessly, throwing his weight against the doors. He heard it again – far fainter, a voice soaked with tears. In hysterics, he threw himself again into the door, again – he backed up, reared up his foot, and kicked with every ounce of strength he could muster. The jammed doors blasted open, slivers of rotting wood rocketed into the abyss of the room that confronted the man now.

He was a quiet man. He was a reserved man; a pianist, a scholar, a foreigner who had built a life on raw talent, a husband and a teacher. In spite of his crippling anxiety and even in spite of his vices he had one thing at his core, one gift; the card which had never before failed him. Nothing was going to stop him now.

But there were also some things that Itzak just didn't know.

It was an auditorium. Or at least, it had been. Itzak burst through, running with all of his might, trench coat flying, by some horrid trick of adrenaline his sense of time suddenly became grinding and sickeningly slow. What seemed like thousands of the ghostly outlines of empty chair after empty chair whistled past him as he descended down the amphitheater seating, hurtling toward the pit; a wicked black moat around the corpse of a once stately stage, rising into focus from the blackness - a rotten platform swathed in withered velvet drapes stained black with mold.

Itzak stopped by a force more powerful than his drive, inertia sending him flying over his own feet; his mouth fell open involuntarily in unadulterated horror. Spread before him in center stage was a nightmare of almost inconceivable proportions. An uncontrollable human scream escaped his lips; he clasped his hands to his mouth, eyes unable to peer wider.

Two figures writhed entwined from beneath the blazing light of a single spotlight; through their paroxysms of movement where female ended and male began lay on the brink of indistinguishable. Atop the famished cadaver of a grand piano lay a distorted white figure, prone, glistening with perspiration, a female back arched impossibly far backwards, a snowy face obfuscated beneath a net of obsidian hair, wrists and arms bent at wrong angles as they clasped onto the edges of the piano. His agonized eyes slipped up wrongly seductive thighs rested vertically upon the torso of a colossal male, upon which delicate ankles rammed into terrible steel contraptions lasciviously clung to massive scarred shoulders standing nearly 7 feet high. The male held the female close to him as he violently took her, with one brusque hand clasped around a milk white throat miniature in comparison, the other viced around the sharp curve of her hip and waist.

He undulated, sending waves through her as she absorbed the pulse of each exertion, which was framed by a floor length drape of human flesh. The female cried out, her head rolling back sensuously – whether from pain or pleasure was indecipherable. Unable to tear his eyes away, Itzak succumbed to the single tortured realization that he recognized the figure beneath the monster.

"NOOOOOOOO!"

The thing stopped its thrusting though its hands continued to grasp his female at the throat and waist; her body arced downward, exhausted, her bare chest heaving with small strained breaths. Quite slowly, it turned its massive helm to look at the man standing in turbulence on the floor beneath the stage.

Itzak was not deceived, some untold instinct stirred within his core that whispered to his logical brain the fatal truth – that what he was looking at was far from human. Itzak froze as it reared its head to look him in the eye; in one resounding, horrible moment Itzak laid sight upon the blasphemy of ironwork where the creature's head should have been; a pointed absurdity of metal too huge to lay upon mortal shoulders. While he couldn't see its eyes, Itzak felt the wraith locked him in its gaze, daring him to react even in the slightest.

Neither male moved.

Though the Russian stood solid as stone, the Pyramid could taste the sharp musk of his fear from across the space that divided them. He savored it in this long moment; he relished it over his black tongue – detecting delicate notes of past corruptions forcefully whitewashed with decades of learned purity. Inside, the Pyramid reviled – the man's sins were simply too faint to sustain him. In his hand he felt his female languish, her hair gliding over his muscled wrist, barely conscious from the strain of their fornication.

Images passed before the Tormentor; slender hands playing the piano, carnal-red ribboned love letters written, hidden and never sent; the cold gleam of a gilt wedding band.

Her memories belonged to him now, and they served him well.

The Pyramid did not break his gaze; the tawny swain before him was her unreturned love. His black soul seethed with rancor; the crowned head of revenants had nothing but contempt for those unlucky enough to interrupt his pursuit of kingly pleasure.

With supreme maliciousness the Pyramid threw her by her hair in one movement from the piano.

Itzak's stomach blazed with fire – without thinking he charged the stage, clearing the gap in mere seconds. He was alive with hatred, with disgust by the brazenness of the monster's insult. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the small, quivering shadow of a female cowering beneath the destroyed piano; naked white skin struck against ink-blots of black strands of hair. The Russian in one swipe unsheathed the revolver and fired into the monster's gut.

The monster stood as steady as stone. Horror crossed European features.

A second shot. Nothing.

Eyes wide open, the infinitely smaller man threw himself out of the crashing force of a knife no mortal could carry. Itzak landed hard on his knees and rolled over, organs firing; the monster leered over him, twisting the crowned helmet of demons towards him from so high above. Itzak scuttled beneath the piano, desperately grabbing at Rain, but his hands caught nothing but hair. She snapped away from him, her limbs shrinking and twitching from his hands.

"What the hell is wro-COME WITH ME! NOW RAIN, NOW!LOOK AT ME DAMMI-"

Black eyes sparkled in the shade.

"My god…"

Beneath a torrent of bedraggled hair was the canvas of a face that was not the same as he remembered. Her eyes, glittering amidst their spindly blood vessels, bore into his being like an axe striking home. His heart stopped, time stopped – he felt, and all the feeling in his organs knew, all in a cold instant, that he was not looking at a person, but something altogether unfamiliar sheathed in the skin of his student.

"Please….Itzak….Run away…" came her small voice, cracked with tears, as she cowered away from him deeper into the shadows.

"No! No! I came here for you! We have to go, god we have to go!" He pleaded with her desperately; in terror he could hear the screech of the Monster's knife sliding closer and closer. He cupped his hand around her thin ankle – it was freezing cold.

"Jesus, COME ON!" he screamed, as he heard the swing of the blade rising up. Terrorized, he threw himself on her as a human shield as the horrific crash of the knife smashed into the top of the instrument, cleaving it into a thousand shards.

And there he was, shielding her in that moment when the splinters of wood seemed to pause in the air like raindrops in a photograph as they lay in the shadow of the monster above them. His ears heard nothing, perhaps a faint hum as milliseconds melted to hours – all was dark but the light gleaming off of the bloodstained blade raising higher once again in the suddenly impossibly slow world. He clutched her to his chest, in that last moment he looked into eyes wreathed in tears, she was saying something that he could not hear.

A siren cut the silence.

Like melting ice, he watched the white leave her eyes.

The siren pounded, deafening. As the floor peeled away to reveal its hell-wrought skeleton, as the lamplight turned to blood, as grey became black, as mist became night, in that moment, he watched the thin veil of female skin beneath his fingers shift.

Before he could react, long, thin arms encircled his body like cement.

"Itzak….Please…Let me die."

At the last syllable, he no longer recognized her voice.

Utterly paralyzed, diamond-hard claws unsheathed from her elongating hands, more like knives than nail. He tried to scream, but his body was limp – his entire will evanesced away by some unseen energy. Her flesh was winter - he shivered violently; he could not tear his sight away from her transforming face, from the ink black eyes losing their softness.

The Tormentor paused, staring down at the man and his lithe captor. Her whiteless gaze leered upwards at him; unblinking , unmoving, burning cold fire. Her blackening mouth opened into a sneer, revealing a chasm of needles framed with hideously sensuous lips. Tears of fear rolled down Itzak's face as he caught a glance of her reflection in the highly lacquered surface of a splintered piece of piano. Wrongly, beauty clung to her wicked form as a sweet dream precedes a nightmare. Her humanity was forgotten.

Pyramid turned his knife slowly, catching the light, sliding it slowly across the grated floor. The steel sang its wretched choir.

No one moved.

In a flash, the Master of Death swung his great knife high.

From each pore of her deathly skin emerged a razored-wire, acting under autonomic control. Like a sea urchin, a halo of ten thousand coldly shining wires surrounded the kneeling creature and her captive, shielding them in a storm of movement. Enraged, the Pyramid lunged his great knife, cleaving into them in an awesome crash. Faster than the eye, the wired swirled faster and faster, forming an impenetrable sphere around the creature and Itzak. The Great Knife screamed as its steel was mauled by the writhing wires-like serpents hundreds of them reached away from the shield-sphere like a sickening arm and sliced around the knife, encircling and pulling it and its owner into the roaring storm of razors. The Pyramid screamed in rage as she and her wires ripped him closer and closer into the blades of her terrible blender of slicing metal hairs. The wires parted like two curtains, revealing her unmoving stare, framed with hair, as she hungrily watched the struggling Tormentor. Dozens of immeasurably long wires shot from her terrible form, flying towards the Pyramid, whipping around the enormous biceps of the beast that pulled upon the hand of the terrible blade. Her sardonic smile widened slightly, her needle-teeth and black eyes shining with unearthly delight as the living wires pulled tight around her opponents arm, slicing into black muscle, drawing rivulets of monstrous life-blood. The Pyramid roared in deafening torture as she pulled tighter, deep into this arm, down to the bone.

They were rising – hundreds of wires shot down towards the floor and pushed, raising them high as she formed them into six swirling-solid legs, jointed like a spider. Wires wrapped around the Russian's body, helplessly he was raised high above her head in a cocoon of steel and gently set onto the floor behind her. As the last wire slipped away, he felt breath seize him – Itzak sank to the ground, free, yet rooted to the spot at the catastrophic horror of the scene before him.

She would need her arms for this.

The pyramid screamed, a deafening bestial roar that shook the walls. In misery, the great form faltered, his great muscles spasming – the gargantuan knife clattered to the floor. The hair-wires swirled faster and faster, snaking around his knees and arms, spraying blood in clouds. At last, with a final pull, she brought him to his knees.

Razorwires germinated from the tips of her toes, enveloping her feet in a torrent until at last she stepped gracefully with an ankle that ended in a buzzing meatgrinder of thin blades four feet long. A vacant smile formed upon her black lips as she looked down at the struggling monster. With a long needled foot, she gently swept the Butcher's blade out of her hallowed path. Rearing his pyramidal helmet to crane a glimpse at her, the monster struggled with his bulging arms to tear at her, his fingers grasping nothing but air.

In a swipe, the wires holding his arms slammed him down onto the floor, his helmet banging mercilessly into the fiery grate beneath them. Unsmiling, unfeeling, she raised her long leg high and brought it down with precision onto the monster's back. Putting her weight forward on her needled foot, it sliced into his flesh as she leaned down near to the subdued and tortured Pyramid, close enough to slide a shapely finger down the ridge of his bowed helm. The Pyramid struggled in vain, his tireless muscles heaving, yet the more he resisted, the farther in she cut until he her feel her sawing to his bones.

With a single finger she lifted his helmet from beneath. She smiled into him.

_I want you to remember this moment._

She lifted her other hand as it split into countless razors. Mercilessly, she reached under his helm, seeking his tongue.

_I want to forgive you, but I need something in return._

The wires invaded him, slipping beneath the helmet, prying open his mouth.

_I want you to know that I've enjoyed our time together._

The wires pierced his tongue, he tried to scream, but she pulled it suddenly and it stifled him.

_I should thank you…_

She was pulling harder – he felt the flesh tearing –

_I have never known such pleasure…_


End file.
